Until recently, internet retail marketers were discovering blogs like this, How To Send A Message To Facebook Fans and When To Use It . It’s always fun to learn new and useful Facebook tips, especially when it comes to how to send messages to all Fans on a Facebook page. What a great feature! That’s right, you could once use a nice little tool called marketing to direct message Facebook Fans.
Many retailers know that marketing messages posted on a business Facebook Page just aren’t seen by everyone (not even close), so naturally marketers who knew about this hidden “send messages to all Fans” function were using it to put marketing messages in every fan’s inbox.
Unfortunately, Facebook recently cut that nifty marketing feature, as reported by this All Facebook site article: News Flash: Facebook Pages Can’t Send Messages. No one knows why it was stomped out, but the guess is that perhaps Facebook saw it as overly spammy and wanted to keep the conversation on the Page (not to mention drive more marketers to using Facebook ads).
Now, all you can do to reach your Fans is post messages to the Page status, or go the ads route, but neither is nearly as personal as the now defunct marketing feature. We’re sad to see the all-fan messaging feature go, especially since it will cost online retailers more to maximize their Facebook.
How are you working around the new changes to maintain Facebook marketing performance? Or, does it make no difference at all for you (who didn’t know about the feature in the first place?)?
